I just took a wander over to one of my favourite ELT blogs (Close Up, by the wonderful Ceri Jones), and saw some fantastic thoughts and ideas in application to the notion of translation in language learning.
If the topic of translation interests you, and you're after some practical ideas on how to approach it in both monolingual and multilingual classroom settings, I really recommend these two posts by Ceri:
Excellent thoughts: thanks Ceri!
=D